What Is Unified Commerce?
Unified commerce is your ability to create a unified shopping experience for your customers regardless of their shopping experiences that improves trust, maximizes sales, and creates a competitive advantage. Unified commerce is your ability to create a seamless, unified experience for buyers regardless of their shopping preferences.
The unified approach takes the traditional omnichannel journey a step further by creating seamless interactions with your buyer and creating an environment where you have real-time access to customer data, product inventory, and sales analytics across all sales channels. With this knowledge, you can confidently make strategic decisions that further improve a buyer’s experience with you and improve sell-through.
Unified Commerce and Brand Activation
Unified commerce does more than create an excellent customer experience throughout the buyer’s journey. As a result of that experience, it amplifies your brand and allows you to create a competitive advantage.
Brand activation is a brand’s ability to attract buyers and create brand recognition at multiple stages in the buyer’s journey. Through a number of tactics, including in-person demos, visual merchandising interactions, and digital marketing, organizations are able to spread their brand and allow customers to relate to the brand beyond just the products being offered. In turn, this improves the chances of them becoming lifetime advocates of your brand and further improving its reach.
A unified approach to commerce eliminates the barriers between online and offline shopping, further improving relationships with customers and activating your brand. To learn more about the correlation between unified commerce and brand activation, read the full article here.
Features to Look for in a Unified Commerce Platform
With a firm understanding of unified commerce, it’s time to begin investigating an actual solution for your organization. As e-commerce continues to rise in popularity, it’s absolutely necessary to have these four key components in your platform to effectively reach and serve your e-commerce customers:
- Managed Live Chat — First things first, you need a reliable way to interact with your shoppers that makes them feel supported and encourages them to purchase. Managed live chat takes the chatbot experience to the next level by combining the power of automation and technology with human interaction. This expedites the customer service process while still ensuring that shoppers are supported by real humans.
- Brand-Matched Advocates — Speaking of those real humans, they must be matched to your brand in order to create real relationships with buyers. If you’ve ever interacted with a store associate or online chat agent who clearly doesn’t understand the product or brand, you know just how infuriating it can be. On the other hand, when the people representing your brand have a firm understanding of your ethics and what the brand actually stands for, they are better able to act as the champion you need to close purchases.
- Chat Routing — Further streamlining the customer experience, chat routing ensures that customers are served by the right representatives at critical points in their buyer’s journey. A platform with specific chat routing capabilities can route chats based on types of lead, location within the buyer’s journey, types of questions, and more.
- Reporting — Lastly, you need to be able to act on the data gathered throughout various interactions to improve your shoppers’ experience. Without concise reporting and data delivery, you are more likely to miss common challenges consistently plaguing your buyers and preventing them from making a purchase.
Read this entire article to learn more about these features and how they impact the e-commerce shopping experience.
How Outsourced Customer Service Improves Sales
Let’s stick with the people aspect of unified commerce for a bit. After all, the people that your buyers interact with — bit it in a retail store or online — have a massive impact on their willingness to make a purchase.
Take the time to answer these questions — what does your current customer service look like for online shoppers? Are shoppers forced to wait in long call center queues before speaking with an agent? Do you utilize email-based customer support that takes multiple days to resolve? Are you only relying on completed automated chatbots to solve problems?
If you answered yes to any of those questions, it’s time to take a step into the modern age of e-commerce customer service. All three of those tactics destroy the customer experience by either adding unnecessary friction to the buying process or confusing customers with automated, useless responses.
As we mentioned above, modern customer service must perfectly combine people and technology. The right technology is useless if it is not in the hands of the right people who can make the most of it; similarly, the world’s best brand representative won’t be as successful without insight into customer purchasing behavior, inventory levels, and other data.
It takes both to provide the best customer service. To learn more about this harmony, read our in-depth article here.
E-Commerce Chat and the Human Connection
Consider this scenario that buyers experience all too often:
- You get an advertisement for a new brand via social media or another digital channel and decide to browse the site to see what they’re about.
- After a few minutes, you find yourself interested in a number of products and just have some simple questions to ask before finalizing your purchase. How does the sizing compare to other top brands? Will this colorway be in stock soon, or should I go with my second preference? What do you recommend for my specific use case?
- However, after opening a chat window and chatting with a bot for a few minutes, you’re left more confused than you were prior to chatting and can’t find the answers to your questions.
- You leave the site unsatisfied, never to return again.
Chances are that every online shopper has experienced something similar to this in their lifetime. These kinds of interactions are a huge wasted opportunity for brands. Clearly, the company did something right to get you into the website, and the products are compelling enough to keep you interested. But what about this closing stretch of the buyer’s journey?
This is where human-based chat becomes so important. While chatbots are certainly useful in some circumstances, just think about how many more purchases you could close if there was a real person on the other side of the screen who lives with your brand every single day!
Want to learn more about striking the perfect balance between AI chatbots and human interaction? Dive deeper in this article.
How to Build a Unified Commerce Experience Using Your Best Customers
While having the right platform and features is crucial in building the best unified commerce experience for your brand, you also need the right people to drive that platform. And though that might seem like a tough task to find retail experts and orient them to your brand, there’s actually a simple place to start — your current customers.
One of the most important things to consider with your brand reps is their ability to relate with your customers. Can they actually answer product-specific questions that will inevitably come up? Will potential customers be turned off by their lack of product knowledge? Can they personably interact with shoppers in-person with genuine communication?
More often than not, your best customers are more than able to have educated conversations about your products that truly influence buying decisions. They use your products, they live your brand’s values and ethics, and they’re already passionate supporters of your brand — why not give them the opportunity to represent your brand?
With the right people in place, you can begin deploying the right technology to various retail locations nationwide or implementing them into your e-commerce customer service function. Take a look at this article to learn more about why your current customers make the best brand reps.
Brand Reps and the Omnichannel Shopping Experience
We’ve discussed why human interaction is so important in the e-commerce space, but what about the shoppers buying in retail environments? Whether you have large D2C stores or stock your products in various retailers, creating a great in-store experience is critical in 2022.
Similar to the e-commerce example we presented, everyone can think of a time when they encountered an unmotivated, lethargic in-store brand ambassador who isn’t passionate about the products they’re representing, ultimately creating a negative experience for every shopper they interact with.
Instead of that experience, what if in-store brand reps oozed passion about the products through educational demos, confidently answered questions about the product’s use case, and took the time to help customers make the right decision that resulted in years of prolonged happy use? Just like that, you’ve won a lifetime customer who is far more likely to make repeat purchases from you and act as an indirect representative through referrals.
Brand reps play such a critical role in the omnichannel experience, and when you give them the tools they need to walk customers through the buyer’s journey in-store and online, you won’t believe the impact it will have on your brand! For complete insights into brand reps and the in-store shopping experience, read this blog.
The Connection Between Data and Business Intelligence
The right people are in place and the right technology is being used — now what? It’s time to collect data, analyze trends, and make intelligent business decisions that drive purchases. In other words, it’s time to leverage business intelligence.
Business intelligence is your ability to organize data, systems, and processes effectively to gain insight into various business aspects, including supply chains, customer service, and other behaviors critical to retail success. BI allows businesses to make confident decisions based on real data coming from their customers, not just opinionated guesses they hope will drive results.
Now more than ever, business intelligence is critical for organizations looking to grow their brand. Today’s consumers expect their needs to be met at every step of the buyer’s journey, and if they’re not, they’ll have no problem taking their money elsewhere. To further understand the impact that business intelligence has on both the in-store and e-commerce shopping experience, read this in-depth blog.
Past, Present, Future: The Evolution of Omnichannel Commerce
You may be asking yourself, how did we get to this point in commerce? Or even more importantly, what’s coming next?
Just like any retail trend, the evolution of omnichannel commerce didn’t happen overnight. Before the e-commerce boom, there was simply in-store shopping in retail environments across the world. Sears was the first to make a shift in commerce by introducing the first-ever catalog which paved the way for magazines, radio ads, call-in orders, and, eventually, e-commerce.
When e-commerce boomed in the early 2000s, the floodgates of online shopping finally opened as products became more accessible than ever to consumers. However, there was still something missing — the connection between online and in-store shopping. Omnichannel commerce filled this gap by making things like buy-online-pick-up-in-store possible. It also improved the buyer’s experience throughout the journey by connecting in-store and online purchases, making it easier to track orders, make returns, and more.
Now, it’s time to take a look into the future. And to put it bluntly, the future of commerce is unified. At this point, omnichannel experiences are the baseline expectation for shoppers; it’s on brands to take those expectations to the next level by creating the truly unified experience we outlined at the beginning of this article.
For more information about what this future looks like, read our full guide on the evolution of commerce here.